1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an object discriminating apparatus used for discrimination of vehicles, men, and the like for, e.g., automatic steering of vehicles, and a method therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In modern society, vehicles have become indispensable as a transportation means. However, many traffic accidents occur by careless driving. For this reason, the study of automatic steering of vehicles has been recently made from the viewpoint of prevention against traffic accidents.
The study of automatic steering of vehicles is branched into various subjects. One of important subjects is concerned with detection and discrimination of an obstacle, wherein an obstacle is detected from a photographic image and the type of the obstacle is discriminated. As a conventional method of detecting an obstacle using a photographic image, a method of determining an object, which is crossing road boundaries on an image, to be an obstacle is known (32nd (first semiannual conference, 1986) National Conference Preliminary Reports 6N-8, pp. 1943-1944, Information Processing Society). According to another known method, a vehicle traveling ahead is determined by detecting horizontal edges in an image on the basis of the fact that the image of a vehicle includes a large number of horizontal edges compared with background image (Journal of the Information Processing Society (Japan), vol. 27, No. 7, pp. 663-690).
In both the above-described methods, however, only an obstacle is detected, but the type of the obstacle cannot be discriminated.